Читать книгу The Psychology of Environmental Law - Arden Rowell - Страница 30

Before we know how much effort to put into seeking or avoiding some future outcome, we have to figure out how much it is worth. To do this, we do not just estimate the absolute worth of the outcome, we also view it as either a “loss” or a “gain” relative to some comparison state of affairs—and the reference point we choose affects our calculations. Prospect theory, also developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (1979), describes how people value losses and gains and how they treat uncertainty and risk regarding each of them. Their basic finding is that losses hurt more than gains feel good: The magnitude of negative emotion people feel when experiencing a loss is greater than the magnitude of positive emotion people feel when experiencing an equally sized gain. This heightened sensitivity to loss is what is typically called “loss aversion.” In addition, people are risk-avoiding for losses and risk-seeking for gains. For instance, if I were to ask you which you prefer: $6 outright or $7 if you roll a 1 on a six-sided die, most people take the guaranteed gain over the gamble, even though the gamble has a higher expected value. In contrast, if you had to pay $6 with certainty or $7 if you rolled a 1, most people would take the gamble over the certain loss. This is prospect theory.

Prospect theory is the foundation for the “endowment effect,” a phenomenon whose discovery began with research into how people value environmental goods. As we discuss further in Chapter 7, this research revealed contingent valuation puzzles—specifically, people in these studies would consistently offer to pay far less for things they didn’t currently have, like a national park or clean air, than they would demand to sell that same thing. But prospect theory is even more interesting when we think about the subjective nature of framing something as a loss versus a gain.

It turns out that the temporally delayed nature of most environmental effects (relative to when we either invest or fail to invest in them) affects whether we see them as gains or losses. Prospect theory says that people evaluate outcomes as either losses or gains based on departures from a relevant reference point, and for most decisions, that reference point is the current status quo (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984). In the context of decisions that affect the environment, then, we are most likely to see how we live and consume today as our “endowment,” which must be traded off to achieve some future possible set of circumstances—the loss or gain. Thus, people tend to give greater weight to entitlements they “own” (such as their time or their freedom to use as many paper towels as they want, or to not compost, or to produce smoke in their widget factory) versus speculative future potential environmental goods (which are probably not fully internalizable to the actor to boot). This phenomenon leads to a form of “status quo bias,” which we discuss in more detail below.

A continuing puzzle for contingent valuation and prospect theory is why people in contingent valuation studies seem to code future environmental goods as gains for which they are relatively unwilling to pay. Why, for instance, aren’t they seeing the failure to get some future environmental good as a painful loss? Since the respondent owns the money she is contemplating exchanging, she could code the transaction as either a loss of her money or a gain of the good (Novemsky & Kahneman, 2005). A barter example may make this framing effect more clear: I own one good (say, a bicycle) and am considering trading for another (say, a laptop). I could see this transaction as losing a bike (loss frame) or getting a computer (gain frame). More research on intuitive framing of environmental goods would be valuable in this realm.

In any case, for policy makers and norm entrepreneurs, the status quo may be sticky, but it is not immutable. Psychology research has shown a number of wrinkles in prospect theory that planners should be aware of, and which in some cases they may take advantage of.

First, although the default reference point for decisions is the status quo, it is only the default and can be overridden. The law can make efforts to reset it (Thaler & Sunstein, 2003; Thaler & Benartzi, 2004; Korobkin, 2014). It might, for example, set aspirational goals in international environmental agreements like the Paris Agreement—which set an aggressive (and perhaps impossible) goal of keeping global temperature change below 2° C and which might recast what is perceived to be the minimum acceptable baseline goal. The threat of missing this new goal may trigger loss aversion in individual actors, who may then work that much harder to achieve it (Rowell & van Zeben, 2016).

Second, if environmental quality changes, people might actually focus on the way things were as their reference point. When changes are for the worse, this may induce people to take otherwise unfavorable risks to regain what they see as the baseline. Think of gambling at a casino to get back to even (Thaler & Johnson, 1990). In environmental contexts, this effect may heighten people’s attention to and concern for degrading environments, and may underlie the common environmental policy goal of antidegradation, which seeks to hold on to the status quo of environmental quality, and to prevent downward changes from that baseline. The Clean Water Act, for example, has as one of its principle objectives to “maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters” (Clean Water Act 101(a)). A number of other environmental regimes both in the United States and around the world embed some form of antidegradation, antibacksliding, or antiregression norm (Glicksman, 2012).

Notably, preoccupation with the perceived status quo will not always lead to pro-environmental behaviors. When environmental quality improves from the perceived status quo, the same effect could lead people to undervalue those improvements, especially when they are categorized as a gain rather than a loss. This could be particularly important in large-scale social and economic disruptions, such as may be generated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Rowell, 2020c). In some cases, the changed behaviors postpandemic may lead to increased environmental quality, for example by lowering pollution from decreased production and transportation. Yet if these changes are generally perceived as gains from the prepandemic status quo, people will tend to intuitively assign these improvements less value.

Policy makers may have options for shaping how people perceive the status quo. When we have expectations that the status quo will certainly change, for example, it can shift our reference point to the future context and make us willing to incur certain costs now to prevent it (Kőszegi & Rabin, 2007). Indeed, even reminding people in subtle ways that it is their own future self who will suffer can induce them to change their behaviors now. For instance, people’s discount rates for future rewards drop significantly when the timing of the future reward is described in terms of their own age (“when you are 47”) rather than in terms of years (“in 10 years”)—an effect that is more pronounced the younger the person (Frederick et al., 2008). In short, to the extent people can be induced not to focus on the current status quo as the referent, their loss aversion to investing and changing present behaviors (and willingness to risk future harms) can be muted. Similarly, a focus on improved environmental quality as the “new” status quo may encourage people to hold fast to those improvements.

Finally, it is also worthwhile to consider that the usual pattern of risk seeking for losses and risk avoiding for gains flips for very low-probability future events. This phenomenon is compounded by people’s overestimation of high-salience low-probability events and underestimation of low-salience, high-probability events, and it leads them to over- and underinvest and insure accordingly. People buy too little flood insurance in the United States, for instance, even though it is federally subsidized and sometimes even required (as for those with federally backed mortgages), because they underestimate the fairly common risks of their area being flooded (Atreya et al., 2015). Yet many of these same people are also willing to pay insurance premiums, often using unreasonably high deductibles, for very low-probability losses like their house burning down, and are willing to buy lottery tickets, which offer notoriously bad odds for vanishingly small chances of winning. Combining prospect theory with these over-/underestimation tendencies, we can see why people tend to underappreciate some high-probability environmental outcomes, underinsure for them, take suboptimal precautions to prevent them, and demand too little from lawmakers to mitigate them.

Still further factors come into play when considering megacatastrophic outcomes, meaning that extremely bad risks are systematically neglected (Wiener, 2016). When risks are extraordinarily rare, there are unlikely to be any instances of recent occurrences that can be brought to mind, and they are therefore less cognitively available (Kahneman et al., 1982; Kuran & Sunstein, 1999; Wiener, 2016). Moreover, as we discuss further in Chapter 8 on climate change, the catastrophic nature of such risks also triggers “numbing,” a cognitive phenomenon whereby extremely large, “mass” risks elicit less emotional affect than smaller, more manageable risks, presumably as a result of a cognitive strategy to tamp down excess trauma (Slovic et al., 2007; Slovic et al., 2013; Wiener, 2016). Consequently, extraordinarily large and unprecedented risks—such as mass extinction (Ceballos et al., 2017) or a nanotechnology accident (Phoenix & Treder, 2008)—are routinely underestimated and undervalued. At the same time, massive gains from the status quo—such as the development of highly effective geoengineering technologies or successful colonization of outer space environments—will also be underpredicted and undervalued, as they will also lack availability and be perceived as underappreciated “gains” rather than as “losses to be avoided” (Rowell, 2020b).

Again, social science research does offer hope for how to recalibrate people’s risk- and benefit-taking behavior for these kinds of events. People do respond to government’s attempts to educate them on the magnitude of risks. Thus, easily accessible, accurate flood maps do improve the likelihood of people buying appropriate levels of flood insurance (Shao et al., 2017). Moreover, a trust in government translates to a trust in government’s estimation of risks. Working to increase trust in government may therefore pay dividends in people’s willingness to plan/spend appropriately for environmental risks, in addition to all the other benefits of such trust (Shao et al., 2017).